Historically, the Supreme Court has offered two justifications for the Exclusionary Rule: one, it protects the integrity of the judicial system from “dirty” evidence, and two, it deters illegal searches by the police. The former justification has mostly fallen out of favor. Today, decisions turn on whether the Rule would, in fact, deter illegal searches in a given class of cases. As such, most empirical studies about the Rule have focused on whether or not the Rule leads to fewer police searches (illegal or otherwise), or to fewer criminal convictions.

This study takes a completely different approach, assessing support for the two competing justifications for the Rule. Two experiments show support for the integrity justification for the Rule, but not for the deterrence justification. Specifically, when deciding whether to exclude evidence found during a search conducted without probable cause, participants are sensitive to a police officer’s motive (clean vs. dirty), but not to alternative means of punishing those officers (civil suit, citizen-police review board). A third experiment examines the integrity rationale in more detail. Participants who were obligated to use dirty evidence at trial disproportionately selected a bottle of Purell over a pen as a thank you gift, versus participants who excluded that evidence. In other words, the Exclusionary Rule protects the courts from being metaphorically tainted.

These findings are important given that the Rule is not constitutionally-mandated. The Supreme Court has held that the Rule can be ignored to the extent that it (a) does not achieve its goals and (b) undermines the perceived legitimacy of the courts by the public. Given this, the Court needs to be right about what those goals are, and whether or not its current deterrence-based jurisprudence enhances legitimacy. These experiments suggest the possibility that reinvigorating the integrity justification would serve the ends of the Rule better than current doctrine does.

In Skilling, on which the Court relies in its decisions in both Black v. United States and Weyhrauch v. United States, also decided today, the Court’s opinion is clear, “To preserve the statute without transgressing constitutional limitations, we now hold that § 1346 criminalizes only the bribe-and-kickback core of the pre-­McNally case law,” citing a 1987 case that overturned a previous version of the law. The Court goes on to specifically exclude from the ambit of this statute the pre-McNally conflict-of-interest cases. “In sum, our construction of §1346 ‘establish[es] a uniform national standard, define[s] honest services with clarity, reach[es] only seriously culpable conduct, and accomplish[es] Congress’s goal of ‘overruling’ McNally.’” But NACDL President Cynthia Hujar Orr explained that, “We are nonetheless disappointed that the Court has held that there remains a place in our criminal justice system for a statute on whose meaning few can agree.”

Orr did say that she is “heartened that the Court has unambiguously rejected government arguments that the ‘honest services’ fraud statute can be properly used across as broad a range of conduct as the government has sought to do in recent years.” Nonetheless, Orr expects “to see future litigation surrounding efforts by prosecutors to wedge their cases into the ‘bribe or kickback’ paradigm to which the Court has now limited this statute.”

Automated traffic enforcement schemes, employing speed and red light cameras, are increasingly used by local governments in the United States. In some schemes, traffic violations are pursued against the owners as well as the drivers of the recorded motor vehicles. Here, the mens requirements that typically accompany criminal code violations are often lacking. A form of strict liability for secondary culprits is justified because of their ability to control the primary culprits using the vehicles and because traffic accidents will be reduced.

While likely to continue to anger many citizens, the surge of automated traffic enforcement schemes will also likely continue since significant deterrence of vehicle violations may follow and because significant additional revenue for local governments will follow. Many violations charged through automated schemes will be processed administratively, that is outside the judicial article courts, freeing trial court judges to handle the pressing business of civil and criminal cases and freeing prosecutors to focus on more serious offenses. Increasing numbers of vehicle owners will likely be punished for the driving of others whose bad acts were never aided, and may even have been expressly banned.

(AP) Gov. David Paterson has proposed roughly doubling New York's DNA database to include samples from even low-level offenders, making it the first in the nation to so broadly collect and use this evidence to solve crimes and exonerate people wrongly convicted.

New York's law would require adding about 48,000 samples a year to a laboratory system that state officials say is capable of handling the extra work, with no current backlogs.

"You think it'd be a huge explosion, but we have samples on so many people that recommit crimes already - it's the old rule of criminals don't specialize," said Sean Byrne, acting commissioner of the Division of Criminal Justice Services.

This Article offers a 50-state survey of robbery statutes, specifically examining the charging and sentencing regimes for the robbery of a business during which multiple people, including employees and customers, are threatened. It begins by presenting a historical overview of the crime of robbery, focusing specifically on the robbery of a business. Then, the survey results are described, and specific problems related to multiplicity of punishment are discussed. Finally, a reasonable and ideal model of business robbery jurisprudence is offered - one that focuses on punishing the defendant proportionally to the severity of the crime committed, and that furthers the intention of criminal law to protect innocent people for the benefit of society.

Issue summary is from ScotusBlog, which also links to briefs and the opinion below:

Walker v. Martin: Whether, in federal habeas corpus proceedings, a state law under which a prisoner may be barred from collaterally attacking his conviction when the prisoner “substantially delayed” filing his habeas petition is “inadequate” to support a procedural bar because (1) the federal court believes that the rule is vague and (2) the state failed to prove that its courts “consistently” exercised their discretion when applying the rule in other cases.

It is a federal crime to “knowingly provid[e] material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.” 18 U. S. C. §2339B(a)(1).The authority to designate an entity a “foreign terrorist organization” rests with the Secretary of State, and is subject to judicial review.“[T]he term ‘material support or resources’ means any property, tangible or intangible, or service, including currency or monetary instruments or financial securities, financial services, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance, safehouses, false documentation or identification, communications equipment, facilities, weapons, lethal substances, explosives, personnel (1 or more individuals who may be or include oneself), and transportation, except medicine or religious materials.” §2339A(b)(1). Over the years, §2339B and the definition of “material support or resources” have been amended, inter alia, to clarify that a violation requires knowledge of the foreign group’s designation as a terrorist organization or its commission of terrorist acts, §2339B(a)(1); and to define the terms “training,” §2339A(b)(2), “expert advice or assistance,” §2339A(b)(3), and “personnel,” §2339B(h).

In recent years, legal scholars have utilized the science of implicit social cognition to reveal how unconscious biases affect perceptions, behaviors, and judgments. Employing this science, scholars critique legal doctrine and challenge courts to take accurate theories of human behavior into account or to explain their failure to do so. Largely absent from this important conversation, however, are Fourth Amendment scholars. This void is surprising because the lessons of implicit social cognition can contribute much to understanding police behavior, especially as it relates to arrest efficiency or hit rates - the rates at which police find evidence of criminal activity when they conduct a stop and frisk. Empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that the police disproportionately stop and frisk non-Whites although stops and searches of Whites are often more successful in yielding evidence of criminal activity. While economists and criminal process scholars both suggest that arrest inefficiency is due to conscious racial bias, the science reveals that unconscious biases may also contribute to this inefficient policing. This Article argues that taking account of the science of implicit social cognition is important to the study of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence and policing. It demonstrates that the failure to recognize the effects of implicit bias has resulted in a Fourth Amendment legal regime that unintentionally exacerbates inefficient policing by strengthening the effects of implicit bias on police behavior. The Article suggests doctrinal and structural changes to ameliorate inefficient policing and more effectively protect privacy against arbitrary government intrusion.